The time between a boss being defeated and a new portal opening has been decreased.

PvP

All healing abilities (including items such as potions) will be decreased in effectiveness by 10% when in Battlegrounds, Arenas, or Wintergrasp.

Arenas

Season 8 has officially begun featuring all-new rewards.

Druid

Balance

: This talent now increases the druid's spell damage by 2/4/6%, up from 1/2/3%.

Shaman

Elemental Combat

: This talent now provides 4/8/12/16/20% extra spell damage to /, up from 3/6/9/12/15%, and 5/10/15/20/25% to , up from 4/8/12/16/20%.

Warlock

Affliction

: This effect can now stack up to 3 times, up from 2. However, the periodic healing reduction effect has been reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10% per application.

Demonology

: The damage bonus granted the warlock by this talent has been increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 2/4/6/8/10%. The buff granted to a raid or party by this talent remains unchanged.

Destruction

Conflagrate: The damage-over-time effect of Conflagrate has been increased to 40% of the spell's total damage, up from 20%.

: The pet bonus damage provided by this talent has been increased to 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%.

: Damage done by increased by 2/4/6/8/10%, up from 1/2/3/4/5%.

Warrior

Protection

: The damage done by this ability has been reduced by 50%, but its threat generation will remain approximately the same.

: This ability now deals 120% of weapon damage, up from 100% of weapon damage.

: The damage scaling from block value for this ability now diminishes faster and diminishes starting at a lower block value. The difference should be negligible for players in high-end tanking armor. In addition, the threat caused by has been increased by 30%.

: This talent no longer allows and to break roots or snares. Intervene remains unaffected.

User Interface

The party leader is now referred to as Guide in chat when a group is formed via the Dungeon Finder.

Fixed a bug where players with Raid Assist capabilities were unable to perform a Ready Check.

Fixed a bug where the first couple of tutorials were not displaying upon logging into the game.

Items

New strength-based melee DPS rings are now available from representatives of the The Ashen Verdict.

Tier-9 Sets: The Aspirant vendors at the Argent Tournament grounds have worked out a deal with merchants in Dalaran so that all item level 232 set pieces will now be available on armor vendors in the city. Set pieces which require trophies will still be available for purchase only from vendors at the Argent Tournament grounds.

Tier-10 Balance Druid 4-Piece Bonus: Fixed a bug to allow for this bonus to properly trigger.

Tier-10 Elemental Shaman 4-Piece Set Bonus: Redesigned. Successful casts now increase the duration of on the target by 6 seconds.

Tier-10 Tank Sets: The gloves and chest pieces for warrior, death knight, and paladin tanks have had their stats adjusted slightly to provide additional armor value.

Tier-10 Warlock 4-Piece Bonus: This bonus should now correctly be applied to the warlock's pet.

Technical Support

The cvar 'processAffinityMask' controls which CPU cores are available for the World of Warcraft client to use. Previously the game client was limited to 2 cores as a default which players could override in the configuration file. In the past this provided a performance boost on some CPUs and operating systems. We have identified several systems that are experiencing severe performance issues with this restriction and have removed it. Players who would like to restore the old behavior can do so by updating the Config.WTF file by adding: SET processAffinityMask "3".